By Terry Sherwood
Bleeding isn’t a horror film in the traditional sense—it’s an addiction drama cloaked in vampire iconography. Think less Nosferatu, more Requiem for a Dream with fangs. Writer/director Andrew Bell isn’t chasing scares; he’s after something heavier: the emotional weight of dependency and the desperation that fuels it.
Peter Cushing once described vampirism as something victims “detest… but cannot relinquish,” likening it to addiction in the film Dracula or Horror of Dracula depending on what side of the water you live. That quote feels like the mission statement behind Bleeding. But while the concept is bold, the execution is less so. Despite flashes of grit and sincerity, the film plays like something we’ve seen before—just dressed in a different coat.
The story follows Eric (John R. Howley), a young man broken by an abusive father and numbed by the hallucinogenic high of “blood”—a literal vampire narcotic. His cousin Sean (Jasper Jones) straddles the line between protector and supplier, a dealer trying to save Eric even as his own life spirals after a bad drug deal. Their story—ducking violence, debt, and the pull of addiction—feels lifted from a dozen other street-level dramas, albeit with vampires snarling at the edges.
Bell’s vampires snarl and shift with guttural menace, but they’re more backdrop than threat. They don’t represent horror so much as metaphor—stand-ins for the things that consume us. Tori Wong makes a striking impression as Sara, channeling the eerie beauty of Asian horror cinema, but she’s underused.
What’s frustrating is how Bleeding dances around what makes its premise unique. The vampire-as-drug metaphor is ripe with sexual tension, danger, and taboo—territory the film touches but never explores. A single crass mention of sex-for-drugs aside, the film avoids the messier, more provocative questions addiction stories demand. The result is a film that’s intense, but never truly daring.
The dialogue leans hard into profanity, often to the point of parody. The tone wobbles between gritty realism and supernatural weirdness, never quite committing to either. You get the sense there’s a more shocking, more visceral version of this film in the editing room—the kind that might’ve leaned into the disturbing image of someone feeding from a vampire’s wound or played more with the dangerous eroticism of the blood high.
Still, there’s something to respect here. Bell is clearly swinging for emotional truth, and the film’s heart is in the right place. At its core, it’s a story about broken people trying not to lose each other. For all its uneven choices and heavy-handed metaphors, Bleeding has moment small ones—of genuine impact.
It’s a familiar trip, but not a wasted one. Bell has ideas. He just hasn’t quite figured out how to sharpen them into something truly new. But there’s enough raw ambition in Bleeding to suggest this won’t be the last we hear from him.
Bleeding arrives on Screambox on 10 June 2025.
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